The federal government will be paying $116 million to settle lawsuits brought by more than 100 former inmates who were incarcerated in the now-shuttered Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Dublin, California.
The settlement was approved on Tuesday and will grant an average of about $1.1 million to each plaintiff, according to ABC News. The prison, which was once known as the “rape club,” was notorious for widespread sexual misconduct among staff members.
This development comes after a separate class-action lawsuit was also settled last week. The court will require the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to enact various reforms, such as allowing a court monitor to inspect facilities while also publicly acknowledging incidents of past abuse that took place in its prisons.
The BOP issued a statement explaining that it “strongly condemns all forms of sexually abusive behavior and takes seriously its duty to protect the individuals in our custody as well as maintain the safety of our employees and community.”
The issue first came to light after The Associated Press published a 2022 report detailing the extent of the abuse and systemic failures at FCI Dublin. At least eight employees, including former warden Ray Garcia, faced charges for sexually assaulting several inmates since 2021.
Garcia was convicted after a trial. The five other defendants pleaded guilty.
The AP’s reporting has revealed layer after layer of abuse, neglect and leadership missteps — including rampant sexual abuse by workers, severe staffing shortages, inmate escapes and the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic — leading directly to the agency’s director announcing his resignation earlier this year.
Among the AP’s findings, so far:
— Mess up, move up: A high-ranking official repeatedly promoted despite numerous red flags, including allegations that he beat inmates in the mid-1990s while a member of a violent, racist gang of guards called “The Cowboys.”
— Sexual abuse: A permissive, toxic culture of predatory employees at a women’s prison in California, fueled by cover-ups that largely kept their misconduct out of the public eye for years. Among the accused is the prison’s former warden.
— Criminal misconduct: More than 100 Bureau of Prisons workers arrested, convicted or sentenced for crimes since the start of 2019, but the agency has turned a blind eye to employees accused of misconduct, in some cases failing to suspend them after their arrests.
— Staffing crisis: Nearly one-third of federal correctional officer positions vacant, forcing prisons to use cooks, teachers, nurses and other workers to guard inmates, hampering the response to emergencies, including inmate suicides.
While this outcome is a step toward accountability in the prison system, there is more work to be done to ensure abuses like these do not persist. The AP report noted that “This isn’t just about one bad prison” and highlighted other arrests and convictions in other facilities.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics documented 2,229 substantiated cases of staff-on-inmate sexual assaults in U.S. correctional facilities. About 69 percent were categorized as staff sexual misconduct, while 31 percent were classified as sexual harassment.